Shared vs. Dedicated & Business vs. Enterprise

LuxSci's services are provided on servers located in USA-based data centers (RackSpace or Amazon).

*Business Class dedicated servers can be provisioned in RackSpace and Amazon data centers around the world
if requested by the customer. There may be an additional setup fee for a non-standard location.

Maximum sending (recipients/month)

100,000

100,000

unlimited

unlimited

Dedicated servers and dedicated clusters can be used for sending very large volumes of email.
Shared services are limited to 100,000 recipients/month.

Full Disk Encryption

*

*Business Class dedicated servers from RackSpace, used for large-scale emailing only have full disk
encryption if requested by the customer. This will require ordering a separate disk.

Dedicated server customers can choose custom backup frequencies and retention schedules; this
may come with an additional cost. Contact sales for more information.

Server Type

Single server

Redundant Cluster

Single Server

Redundant Cluster

Business Class servers are single virtual servers running in the RackSpace or Amazon Public cloud.
Enterprise Class servers are VMWare virtual servers running on a redundant cluster of servers in LuxSci's
Private Cloud at RackSpace.

Dedicated IP: Dedicated Reputation

In a shared solution, many 100s or 1000s of separate customers share the same server. Security replies on logical
and software partitioning of access and resources. Shared solutions are inherently less secure, have
less consistent performance, but are less expensive. Dedicated servers are recommended for when security and
consistent performance are important.

Ultra-reliable: proof against hardware failure

Enterprise Class servers are virtual machines that run on a redundant VMWare cluster. If one of the underlying
hypervisors should have a hardware issue, all servers running on it are immediately rebooted on
another hypervisor, limiting potential downtime to seconds.

Choose Enterprise Class when server uptime is a very high priority.

Server Isolation: All servers running on the same hardware belong to LuxSci. No public cloud servers.

In the Business Class environment, your server is in a Public Cloud. This means that other servers running
on the same underlying hardware (hypervisor) may be owned by organizations unrelated to LuxSci. This provides
some security risk compared to use of LuxSci's Private Cloud Enterprise Class environment,
where LuxSci owns the underlying hardware and is in control of all servers running on it.
Additionally, the Business Class environment may have less consistent
performance due to the possibility of "noisy neighbor" servers outside of LuxSci's control.

LuxSci has exceeded our expectations in every way. Setting up the account was very simple. The different rates for the amount of mail you wish to send makes it easy to pick the plan that best suits your needs at a affordable price. Customer Service has been attentive when needed. Most importantly the mailing has gone very smoothly and without interruption. I am a very happy customer and would highly recommend LuxSci to anyone looking to improve your mailing needs. Thank you LuxSci."

Dax Kirks . Best Buy Windows and Siding

FAQs: Perhaps you were wondering...?

While LuxSci does not offer pay-as-you-go sending, High Volume Email
Sending is available as an add-on to shared secure email services as long
as your sending needs are modest (less than 100,000 messages/month).

A recipient is an email address a message is sent to. It's also the
unit we use to measure your email sending. One message to one person is one
recipient, two messages to the same 10 people comprise 20 recipients, 1000
messages to one person each equals 1000 recipients.

LuxSci does not limit the number of messages you can send at once.
You can send a single message or email blasts that go to thousands or
millions of recipients. Your plan determines the maximum number of
recipients you can send to per month.

Yes. LuxSci SecureLineTM has a
special feature called TLS
Exclusive. When you enable this, LuxSci will dynamically use Forced
TLS to deliver your messages securely to everyone who can support TLS and
will drop messages to those who don't (with appropriate notes in our
delivery tracking system). If you have low priority messages (e.g., email
marketing messages) which still need to be secure (e.g., in healthcare),
"TLS Exclusive" high volume sending is a perfect fit.

The number of sustained concurrent connections you can make at once
depends on your service level. Large dedicated servers or clusters would
be recommended for cases requiring high levels of concurrency. See Sending Rates.

While any email provider can and does get blocked on occasion,
LuxSci takes stringent measures to keep this from happening. LuxSci has
very strict acceptable use policies and manually checks every new customer
to keep spammers out. LuxSci's monitoring system works to detect any
improper use before it becomes a problem. As a result, problems are rare.
If a problem does occur, LuxSci's staff have the training to resolve the
issue ASAP. Also, when you have a dedicated server (and thus a dedicated
IP address), your IP address reputation reflects only your own sending
history.

No, you do not need to change your email hosting service to LuxSci.
You can easily configure your sending programs to send your emails through
LuxSci's email sending service without affecting your existing email
solution.

LuxSci provides the option of sending email via a dedicated
server. The type of server used depends on your high-volume plan. Your
dedicated server may or may not use IP addresses recently used by other
customers. So, they may or may not be "pre-warmed." We recommend warming
up your new server yourself for best delivery results. See also: Warm
up your IP automatically.

While neither LuxSci nor anyone else can ensure that every message is
delivered to every Inbox, our excellent reputation and stringent security
measures maximize the chances that your email messages will go to the
intended recipients. LuxSci will advise you on how to construct your
messages and maintain your lists and campaigns for the best result. See Key
Ingredients for Good Deliverability.

Features: High Volume Secure and Basic

LuxSci's High Volume Email Sending Service includes two service
options, "Basic" and "Secure." High Volume Basic is a stand-alone
SMTP-only service that is available by special order only for customer
with large-scale SMTP relaying needs.

High Volume "Secure" (also known as "Premium High Volume") is an
add-on to our email hosting services which provides full featured secure
email sending with high volume sending limits. Both options have the same
set of capabilities and reporting options that you need to send your
emails and to track their status. The High Volume Secure Sending service
provides more extensive security options, such as HIPAA compliance,
outbound email encryption, email archival, and additional administrative
features and controls.

DKIM allows receiving email servers to feel more confident that the email originated from the listed domain, increasing the deliverability of your message.

SPF/SenderID

SPF and Sender ID authentication information is used by receiving email servers that are checking for spam. The existence of this information reduces the chance that your email is blocked.

Anonymous SMTP - IP Masking

Anonymous SMTP hides the IP address of the computer or server that is
sending the message. This feature increases deliverability when you are
sending from an ISP or location that is blocked or has a poor reputation.

IP Monitoring

LuxSci checks its server IP addresses to make sure that they are not on
blacklist databases and to immediately alert us of any blacklisting issues
so that they can be immediately addressed.

Graylist and blacklist resolution

LuxSci works to resolve problems that may have resulted in your IP being
gray or blacklisted.

Reporting

This online or emailed report lists successfully sent messages. It can be downloaded, sorted, and searched

Tracking and Deliverability

This online or emailed report lists the delivery status of every message
sent to every recipient. It can be downloaded, sorted, and searched. For
messages that were not successfully delivered, the delivery issue is
listed. Summary reports are available on a daily and monthly basis.

This emailed report lists all email delivery status updates for all
messages sent to a specified email address or list. It is useful for
automating processes and for automatically informing you of issues. It is
delivered to you automatically on a frequency that you select (e.g.,
weekly). The report is sent to your email in HTML and also includes an
Excel file for easy analysis.

Email Delivery Failure Reports

This report lists all email delivery failures and includes the reason why
the delivery failed. The report is sent to your email in HTML and also
includes an Excel file for easy analysis. It can be used, for example, to
discover misspelled addresses and to remove non-working addresses.

Feedback Loops (SPAM notifications) with Major ISPs

LuxSci works with major ISPs to quickly detect spamming and other issues
and to help keep our servers off black lists. LuxSci users can see SPAM
complaints by logging into the system. Users can also have their SPAM
complaints automatically sent to their email. Complaining recipients can
then be easily removed from their mailing lists.

Auto-block future email to complainers (optional)

For recipients that complain that your messages are unwanted/spam-like, and where those
complaints come back through the standard feedback looks from Major ISPs, LuxSci can
automatically add the problem recipient email addresses to your domain-wide recipient block list.
Thence forward, all email sent to those same addresses by anyone in the same domain will be automatically
blocked (and logged).

Its your job to make sure that your mailing lists are opt-in and clean and to remove the addresses of
everyone who complains in any way. Auto-blocking of complainers is a safety net for you -- even if you make a mistake
and send to a complainer ... we will be sure the message is stopped before it gets to them.

This feature must be enabled in your domain's outbound email settings page.

Administration

Private labeling is an additional service offered to high volume
customers. Private labeling enables your customer to see only references
to your company, not LuxSci, on your user interface and sent emails.

Account-wide monthly recipient limit

For each account, choose the monthly recipient limit. A recipient is one
email sent to one person.

This option allows you to use a familiar username or a branded username
for login.

Usage notices sent automatically at customizeable thresholds

Track your SMTP usage with reports that are automatically sent to the
sender or account administrator when usage reaches a specified limit.

Easy and instant recipient volume upgrades

As your email usage expands, LuxSci supports this growth with the upgrades
you need.

Receive & check inbound email

Get a fully-functional email hosting account with
SecureLineTM, IMAP, POP, and WebMail access to your inbound email. This is
very useful if you need to process replies and bounces, or need to managed
secure replies to encrypted outbound email messages.

Depending on what you need, this kind of account can be upgraded to
add such things as Premium inbound email spam and virus filtering, inbound and
outbound email archival, domain registration and DNS services, more disk
space, private labeling, web hosting and more.

How Fast Can You Send Email?

For the best throughput, choose the most powerful server or cluster that
you can afford. When speed (i.e., messages/hour) is a factor, a more
powerful server will receive, process, and deliver deliver your messages
faster. If budget is limited, a less powerful server may still get your
message out in an acceptable time frame.

For increased capacity, high burst rates, or to account for other
factors (see below) like large messages, lack of pipelining, etc., we
recommend load-balanced multi-server clusters.

What do these terms mean?

Sending Rate

The sustained rate at which you can send email messages is based on many factors:

Shared vs. dedicated

Server power (CPU cores, memory and disk speed)

Email sending program used

Use of SMTP pipelining

Use of SSL/TLS

Proper use of concurrent connections

Network speed between the sending program and LuxSci

Message size

Recipient server and DNS performance

Blacklisting and greylisting

Recipients/message

Message encryption

Other message processing

Throttling

Maximum Rate

The "maximum sending rate" (msgs/hr) is a theoretical maximum rate that
you can achieve through the service. It assumes optimal sending
conditions: very small (1 KB) messages, through a very fast network
connection, all to the same recipient domain, where there is no
blacklisting or greylisting, where SMTP Pipelining is used without SSL,
where outbound encryption is not needed, and where the recommended number
of concurrent SMTP connections is employed.

Spotlight Mailer Maximum Rate

The "maximum sending rate" (msgs/hr) for Spotlight Mailer is a
theoretical maximum rate that messages can be sent from LuxSci's Spotlight
Mailer under the same optimal sending conditions: very small (1 KB)
messages, all to the same recipient domain, where there is no blacklisting
or greylisting, where encryption is not needed, and where SSL is not used.
Spotlight mailer is has an extremely fast connection to the SMTP server,
uses SMTP Pipelining, and uses 4 concurrent connections.

Actual throughput with Spotlight Mailer will be less based on the other
factors which affect the sending rate: SSL, Message size, Recipient server
and DNS performance, blacklisting and greylisting, any additional
processing being performed (e.g. anonymization or encryption), and others
use of the Spotlight Mailer system (unless you have a dedicated Spotlight
Mailer install)

Expected Rate

Under realistic sending conditions, you may find your sending rate to be
closer to the listed "Expected" rates, assuming that you also use SMTP
Pipelining, 1 recipient per message, no SSL, have moderately small
messages, no encryption, use a good email sending program, and use the
recommended number of concurrent SMTP connections.

Expected Daily Rate

This is an estimate of the number of messages that you could send
in 24 hours of sustained sending at approximately the "Expected" hourly
rate.

Sustained vs Burst Rate

For some customers, the speed of sending is very important. There are two significant modes of sending:

Sustained Rate

Sending at a consistent rate for a long period of time. E.g. 20,000 messages/hour for minutes or hours.
Sustained rates are relevant when sending an email marketing blast to a large subscriber list.

Burst Rate

A "burst" refers to sending a bunch of messages in a very short time; e.g. 25 or 50 messages within
a second or two. Burst differs from "sustained" in that when you are not "bursting" you are
sending one or a few messages here and there ... infrequent sending. Bursting is relevant for
transactional email messages when you are sending them "as needed" but require the ability to
send many at once should that need arise, as it will.

Sending speed is important for customers who need to send large
mailings at a sustained rate. Understanding sending speed helps you
determine how long it will take to send that blast to 100,000 or 1 million
subscribers.

Factors Affecting your Sustained Sending Rate

There is a theoretical maximum number of messages/hour that any server
can manage. How fast you can actually send is affected by a number of
factors.

1. Shared vs Dedicated

Dedicated servers will generally be faster. On shared servers, you
must share the server's sending
capacity with others and thus you do not have control over the capacity available to you at any particular time.

2. Server Power

More powerful servers can handle more concurrent connections and
thus give you higher sending rates. The number of CPU cores is the
primary factor governing performance; however, memory and disk speed are
also important.

3. Email Sending Program

Different email marketing/sending programs have different capacities
for how efficiently they can send high volumes of email. Simply switching
from one program to another can increase your throughput significantly.

Use an email marketing program (like LuxSci Spotlight Mailer) that supports SMTP Pipelining. With this feature,
the program opens a single authenticated connection to the server and sends multiple messages in succession
over that connection. This is significantly faster than opening a new connection and logging in again
for every single message to be sent.

SSL is extremely useful for security and for the protection of your
username, passwords, and message content.
However, when using SSL, your email sending program and your server must
perform work encrypting and
decrypting all of your messages. This overhead will slightly slow down
your rate of sending.

6. Concurrent Connections

If your sending program can open 2 connections to our SMTP servers
at the same time and send two messages at once,
then your sending rate can generally be up to twice as fast. Depending
on how powerful your server is
and how slow your network connections are, you can use more and more concurrent connections to achieve
higher and higher sending rates. Combined with SMTP Pipelining,
an appropriate number of concurrent connections goes a long way to
maximizing your throughput potential.

The recommended number of concurrent connections for best results in
sustained sending is given for each
server type.

Note, that if you use more concurrent connections that is
recommended, then you are likely
over-working your server. That results in your sending rates actually getting slower.
Stick to the recommended number of concurrent connections.

7. Network Speed

Your messages must be transmitted from your email sending program to
our servers. The speed of your network, any packet loss, and the distance between your sending computer
and our servers can significantly impact the maximum rate that you
can send messages.

For example, LuxSci Spotlight Mailer sends from a server right
next to your outbound email servers and thus network speed is not a factor.
For someone connecting from outside of LuxSci or internationally, the speed can slow down significantly.

8. Message Size

Like network speed, the larger your messages are, the more time it will take to transmit them from
your email sending program to our servers. For example, on a fast network,
increasing message size from 1KB to
1MB decreased throughput by 50%.
The actual impact of size will depend greatly on your network speed and other factors.

9. Recipient Email Server and DNS Speed

In order for our servers to deliver messages to your recipients, the servers
have to (a) look up where to deliver the messages
to (DNS), and (b) talk to those servers to deliver the messages to them.
If the DNS lookup as slow or the recipients are
in domains that no longer exist, this step can take a while.
If the recipient's email servers are overloaded, on a slow network, or
are having other issues, then the delivery phase can be slow.

Delivering many messages to recipients with these issues
will slow down your entire sending process... as other messages have to wait for the slower ones to be sent.

10. Blacklisting and Greylisting

If your email content or sending patterns have gotten your server blacklisted or greylisted, then
delivering email messages to recipient servers that are now blocking you or deferring you can slow down
your delivery rates.

This can also cause a backlog of messages that are waiting to be accepted by these recipient servers.
The need to Retry the backlog slows the process of delivering all other messages (though it does not block their
delivery).

11. Recipients per message

Most email marketing and transactional email messages are sent
individually to each recipient. This allows easier tracking of
opens, views, etc. However, if you send each message to many recipients (e.g., 100s of recipients), then
your sending program has significantly fewer messages to deliver to our servers. The delivery of your
messages to our servers can happen
10s or 100s of times faster than if you sent in the usual one recipient/message pattern.

Additionally, if each message contains only recipients in a specific domain,
then actual delivery to these recipients
can be expedited by this efficiency. E.g. If you are sending to 500 AOL users,
instead of sending 500 individual messages,
send one message with all 500 AOL users listed as "BCC" recipients. Delivery can be almost 500 times faster.

12. Email Encryption

It takes some system resources (CPU cycles and network requests) to auto-encrypt outbound email messages.
If all of your messages need SecureLineTM outbound encryption, this will somewhat detract from the maximum delivery
rate. The impact will depend on many factors such as which encryption modes are used, if DNS
additional lookup need to be made, etc.

13. Outbound Processing

If you are using SMTP Anonymization or
other email processing features that come with High Volume Secure Sending
(e.g. content scanning, recipient restrictions, size restrictions,etc.), this processing will affect your maximum
sending rate.

14. Throttling

LuxSci has features that can be used to rate limit the processing of outbound email. This is usually
used when "warming up" IP addresses to assist senders in sending slowly and establishing their IP address
reputation.

This rate limiting is on, your maximum sending rate will be capped by this process.

From Addresses

A user can send from any "From" or "Reply To" addresses without the
need for prior approval (except for those addresses excluded by the next
item).
Note that our regular Acceptable Use Policy still applies; sending
messages from addresses that you don't own or manage is an AUP violation
and subjects your account to possible termination without notice.

A "From" address cannot be that of any email
service provider (free or not). That is, no sending bulk messages from "AOL,"
"Gmail," "Hotmail," "Yahoo!," your college email address, etc.
In general, you should only send from a valid address in a domain you own.

Abuse Tracking

Headers are added to each message sent so that it can trace back
to the sender should anyone report abuse complaints. Headers also include
information to notify recipients to contact LuxSci to report abuse.

Message Content

LuxSci Support reserves the right to inspect (in a way compliant with our
privacy policy and HIPAA BAA, if appropriate) any message sent
through the High Volume messaging service to ensure that every message
meets our terms of service.

All messages must indicate in the body of the email why
the recipient is getting the message and provide a viable means by which
the recipient can opt out of future mailings.

Other Restrictions

The sender must promptly comply with any and all opt-out requests.

Spam, unsolicited commercial email, email sent to purchased email
lists, any bulk mailing to anyone not explicitly expecting your messages
are not permissible.

The terms of service are strict; LuxSci will not tolerate abuse.
LuxSci may suspend service without notice if it receives any complaints and
until the parties resolve the issue.